No disrespect intended to Tcumsesh, but I think he is utterly wrong on this front. There may well, in the past, have been a requirement to demonstrate you could manage numbers of people, but if it was, it is dead, buried and no longer remotely relevant.
If it helps, I have never, ever, seen any hint of a personnel description of this sort in the last 15 years when it comes to discussing requirements for direct entry. I say this as someone who has a reasonable amount of experience sniffing round HR manuals on promotion and staffing issues.
Thank you Jim. As stated, the Grade Descriptions I cited are no longer implemented. However, to my knowledge they have not been rescinded. (Like many perfectly good regulations!). I still have my copy because during one audit by the Treasury I was one of those, at my grade (PTO3), selected for assessment. At the time I was what today would be called a Requirements Manager (i.e. something you do before being deemed suitable for promotion into MoD(PE)). I happened to pass, but a few years later, as an HPTO in PE, failed because I had not managed ELINT programmes. Only radar, comms, nav, sonics, EW and software. I could not receive a "Fitted" for promotion until I did at least year on ELINT. Granted, today, that could not be part of the criteria, but I believe we still have some of the others.
Nor, I concede, could be the management of 600, because we don't have many establishments with sufficient numbers! But the principle holds good, that of seeking consistency in any given grade.
Another factor is that, hitherto, staff had to demonstrate to the promotion board the ability to undertake any job at the next grade. That changed to persuading them that, in time, you'd be able to do the post you were applying for. That's a BIG difference.
You are of course correct that this criteria is not, and never has been, deemed relevant to direct entrants. That is my point. The same year I failed was the year the direct entry scheme really took off. Immediately, there was a 2-tier system - and there still is. The difference today is the inexperienced are in the majority. What hasn't changed is they can never attain the competencies required of a non-direct entrant, typically gained at the 5 previous grades (or 6 if you count apprentice). The CS has dumbed down and long ago reached the stage, described by the likes of Engines, where very senior people now do tasks considered routine by older, less senior, colleagues.
In the Services, at any given rank, I always found a high degree of consistency in training, experience and competence. Not so in the CS, especially after about 1990. Servicemen, quite rightly, found it hard to understand why 2 CSs at the same grade could have such vastly different backgrounds. One deemed inexperienced and not quite competent enough because he'd only managed 100 or so projects, in the process having been leader of significant teams; the other deemed experienced and suitable for grade skipping after a couple of years as minutes secretary on a single, minor project.
Look where it led us. That poor sod of an MRA4 "Safety Manager", completely untrained for the job and nothing in his background that would suggest he could be. Named and shamed by H-C, yet the underlying policy, that of bums on seats regardless of suitability, ignored. He wasn't to blame. It was an organisational failure.